Oddbean

Bitcoin is definitely more trust worthy than ICANN. There's no rent seeking with bitcoin, it just operates as a time-chain to operate as a tie-breaker if two people want the same name. And you can also make a fun trading game. There's no rent seeking because it's not renewed every year, bitcoin is property rights.

To be honest. The question is if we need global names at all. Why bother if you can go with bookmarked alias/pet names for hash/pubkey based addresses and when you encounter a new key, you query your social network to get the pet/aliases of trusted peers. thats what ppl do already. they trust bookmarks and links they find on websites and trust into browser autocompletion in url bars... nobody types addresses manually. you literally in practice dont need global names. this is not how anyone uses stuff. otherwise ppl consume digitally and for offline you have QR codes... so essentially backwards to introduce a can of worms we can go without. its a shitcoin features, e.g. ENS or whatever ... they solve a problem we dont really have in practice

Global naming system creates a standard reference point. It's useful for some things, and less useful for others. If it were not useful, everyone would let their domain names expire. But they dont, so people see value in it.

Local names (bookmarks) and autocomplete definitely work for some cases, but they alone without global short names objectively provide worse user experience than what everyone is used to. Couple that with a much larger attack surface for fishing scams and it creates a not very secure paradigm for an average user, onion services proved this point over the years. Also consider that such Bitcoin based system can work in parallel with cheaper randomised domains of Pubky. It doesn’t have to scale enormously, it will create a free market where people who want a short name will have to pay the costs of doing so. As far as I am concerned Nomen would not burden Bitcoin network significantly, so the cost of having a decentralised short name would be the same as the cost of sending a normal on-chain Bitcoin transaction, which seems more than reasonable.

I want to give every adult a sovereign domain, that can't be done on Bitcoin. I don't know what more to say. The only thing we can do is invest in UX solutions to all the problems you mentioned. There will never be a future where everyone who wants a domain on Bitcoin can have one, so even if it is superior to ICANN (which it is not because at leas ICANN names works everywhere) it is a dead end. You are free to use it. And good luck convincing people to buy a name that they can't use anywhere, and then they can't use your app before they buy that useless name. Namecoin existed forever man, no one cares, let's try something with less barriers to entry.

yeah. we might be different. where we wanna go, nobody needs to buy any names. The problem you want to solve is a problem that doesnt exist. It is a problem made up by people who want to offer a solution that makes them money. A lot of web3 is just that, even though bitcoin is enough. You dont understand what i am saying if you think somebody has to "buy a name". 🤷‍♀️

I get your point, but I see no reasons for both solutions coexisting and providing their unique benefits either in tandem or separately. As for the Namecoin and other shitcoin solutions, that is just silly and we all understand it. However using Bitcoin + NOSTR seems like an appropriate truly censorship resistant and decentralised solution for short names.